With all this going on over Facebook & recently seeing the EUs proposal to tax these companies ie Facebook, Google etc involving billions in tax revenues. I wonder what would happen if the Yanks shut those companies down for a month?

I remember the forlore when Turkey closed down FB, Twitter and I think another one and the country was in an uproar.Teenagers were in need of counselling as they couldn't talk to their friends sat next to them.Shopkeepers were at a loose end.The country went to pot.

They would be missed but folks would get over it, the folk who make money from them via advertising sales would miss them more, I wonder if these Social Media Barons contribute to any Political parties? There is the real problem Political Turkeys don't vote to reduce their own feed,

I certainly wouldn’t be in lumber … eMail, cell phone & Skype are plenty enough for me. I’m not inclined to chat, I only use them to ask or answer a question & then goodbye.

Imo Facebook is far too intrusive.

Indeed I’ve just upset an acquaintance today that sends me emails & FB messages a dozen times a day “what are you doing etc etc” . Now he’s upset because I don’t answer them - maybe now he’ll get the hint

It must be fairly simple to trace the country that the customer has clicked their mouse in, and generate tax for that country. the Eu needs to up its game and force this change to ensure that google and FB etc pay their share of taxes. You can be sure that they will not introduce this unless they are forced to.

“In retrospect, it might have been a mistake to give Facebook all of my personal information in exchange for seeing what my high school friends eat for dinner.”

So one Twitter wag quipped a couple of days after news broke that Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy firm, had harvested information from Facebook about tens of millions of Americans, and may have used it to try to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Facebook greets you on its login page with the slogan “It’s free and always will be,” but that’s not strictly true. Users pay to use Facebook by supplying their personal data, photos, videos, and much more. The pages, posts, pictures and videos that users “like” are tracked, and, with special software, can be used to predict the user’s buying habits, movie, book and music tastes, and even their political leanings.

That’s valuable data.

But as the Cambridge Analytica case shows, there may be other hidden dangers to providing Facebook all that valuable personal data for free. The company, according to reporting by the Guardian, New York Times, and the UK’s Channel Four News, used a vast data set harvested from Facebook users to perform psychological analyses of millions of U.S. voters. It then targeted them with political advertising designed to influence the way they voted.

There are a host of ethical issues connected to this case – not least the fact that much of the personal data was harvested without many users’ explicit permission or knowledge, and Cambridge Analytica may have illegally coordinated its actions with the campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump.

But the most important one is that the data users provided to Facebook may very well have been used to affect the outcome of a democratic election, and possibly the referendum in the UK on leaving the European Union. That’s not something Facebook users signed up for.

Facebook owes its users, and indeed the whole of democratic society, an explanation of how its data was allowed to be used in this dangerous way, and assurances that it won’t happen again. Our democracies are too valuable to be swapped for the chance to keep up with old friends’ dining habits.

It's not quite the same with loyalty cards, I can't see Migros affecting the next election, they don't have the same power to change people's minds. Facebook is clearly playing with the data that people give them, maybe we should start setting up fake accounts to dilute the data that they have.